Oracle Reports Earnings: A Much-Needed Beat

Oracle just reported its second quarter earnings and there’s lots of good news to behold.

Oracle reported non-GAAP revenue of $US9.28 billion and adjusted earnings per share of 69 cents. That’s a beat on profit.

Analysts expected Oracle to report adjusted earnings of 67 cents a share, up from 64 cents in the year-earlier quarter and revenue basically flat at $US9.18 billion.

New software licenses and cloud software were essentially flat, and that’s not good.

But hardware, Oracle’s problem child, did relatively well, shrinking only 3%. Some analysts were expecting hardware to decline as much as 13%. Oracle had said that it would shrink between 1% and 11%.

It’s good that Oracle exceeded expectations this quarter because it missed revenue expectations for the previous three quarters in a row. Oracle president Mark Hurd has been rejiggering Oracle’s famous sales force for more than two years now, doing things like changing sales territories and hiring college grads to increase sales. So far, these efforts haven’t stirred the hoped-for growth, so this is a good sign.

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